Friday, August 19, 2016

Patzold and the Origins of the C Recension: II

A multi-part ode upon aspects of a recent book and the C recension of the False Decretals. First post here.C
receives material from the Collectio
Sangermanensis. That means something. Unfortunately, the Sangermanensis is also very hard. The
best extant manuscript, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Ms. lat. 12098
(hereafter, P), indeed hails from Corbie. It was copied in the third quarter of
the ninth century and its margins have received various annotations. Patzold
wonders whether these annotations are evidence that the Pseudo-Isidorians or the compilers of C took an interest in the volume. Yet P coexists
with Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Ms. 397 (hereafter, W). And a
third copy was once known at Beauvais but has since been lost. Finally, Hincmar
of Reims demonstrates knowledge of some of the items assembled in the Sangermanensis. For Patzold, this
suggests that Hincmar had access to a version of the False Decretals very much like C. That is a possibility, but at this stage the blunter and simpler approach is
simply to acknowledge that we have four distinct witnesses to the Sangermanensis from the ninth century: three
of them direct (P, W and the lost Beauvais codex) and one indirect (Hincmar).
Of these four, three hail from the archiepiscopal province of Reims (P,
Beauvais, Hincmar). To argue that the Sangermanensis points to Corbie is
therefore not wrong so much as it might be overly precise—a neglect of
the forest for the trees. The synoptic view must be that the Sangermanensis has ties to Reims
generally. The Reims province, of course, is not only Pseudo-Isidore’s stomping
grounds, but the epicenter of his ecclesiastical concerns and the environment
in which the False Decretals first circulated and where they were the most
used.

Readers
at Corbie have annotated the folios of P. You can study the annotations yourself. So far I have found nothing obviously Pseudo-Isidorian about these
annotations. That is to say, P does not have the distinctive Pseudo-Isidorian marginal
cipher that Klaus Zechiel-Eckes discovered in the source codices directly exploited by the forgers. Furthermore, I cannot spot any
direct relationship between marginal annotations in P and material appropriated
by the C recension. I am open to being corrected on this point, but until I am,
I must write that I see no evidence that ties Sangermanensis material in the C recension to P specifically. Patzold’s argument on this front resembles somewhat his assertions surrounding
the Bobbiensis and the Grimanica: It is possible to lean upon
the evidence such that a Corbie connection becomes arguable, but that
connection does not emerge unforced from the sources.

The
CollectioSangermanensis can be divided into four parts:

1.
A substantial fragment of the Codex
Encyclius. The Codex Encyclius,
issued by Emperor Leo I in 458, consists of letters from the pope and
metropolitans from across the empire on the orthodoxy of the Council of
Chalcedon and the case of Timothy Aelurus, patriarch of Alexandria. Timothy’s
predecessor, Proterius, had been driven from his see and killed by
anti-Chalcedonians, who then installed Timothy as an ideologically acceptable
replacement. The Codex Encyclius is a
resounding statement against Timothy and in favor of Chalcedon. It
was translated into Latin under the aegis of Cassiodorus at Vivarium.

2.
The Breviarium of Liberatus of
Carthage, essentially a polemical history in defense of the Three Chapters that
opens with the consecration of Nestorius as patriarch of Constantinople in 428,
and that concludes with the Second Council of Constantinpole in 553. The Breviarium draws heavily on the Historia Tripartita of
Cassiodorus/Epiphanius.

3.
Five items that seem out of step with the rest of the Sangermanensis. These include

i) Prosper of Aquitaine’s Contra collatorem, a treatise on the
necessity of grace written in refutation of John Cassian’s Conlatio XIII;

ii) a letter of Aurelius of Carthage on the
condemnation of Pelagius (Clavis Patrum Latinorum no. 395);

iii) excerpts from
Augustine, Ep. 186, also relating to Pelagianism;

iv) Pope Gelasius I
to Euphemius of Constantinople, Quod
plena cupimus, JK 620, in which Gelasius rebuffs the attempts of Euphemius
to restore communion during the Acacian schism in 492;

v) Damasus to Paulinus
of Antioch, Per filium meum, JK 235, in the usual form with anathemas appended from the Roman council of 380.

There are two reasons to suspect these pieces might not belong: The dominant concern of the second half of the Sangermanensis, from the Breviarium in Part 2 through the letters in Part 4 below, is a defense of the Three Chapters. The items in Part 3 address other matters, particularly, in i-iii, Pelagiansim. Moreover, some of them seem to hail from the Collectio Quesnelliana or a related collection (ii, iii, v). The rest of the Sangermanensis manifests no Quesnelliana connection.

4.
A concluding sequence of letters and other brief items purporting to bear, like
the Breviarium of Liberatus, on the
Three Chapters.

Eduard
Schwartz, editor of the Sangermanensis,
argued that Part 3 did not belong and he excluded it as a later
accretion from his edition. This third part is nevertheless present in both extant witnesses
to the Sangermanensis, P and W. We
cannot know for certain whether it stood in the lost codex from Beauvais. What textual evidence there is, however, suggests that the lost Beauvais
witness aligns textually with P as against W, so it would not be surprising to
find that this lost manuscript did attest
to all four parts. For what it's worth, Hincmar, our indirect witness, cites Propser's Contra collatorem (from Part 3?) and
he also knows the Breviarium in Part 2.

Did
the architects of C also have access to a four-part Sangermanensis like that described above? Well, maybe. They appropriate both the Breviarium
in Part 2 and the concluding letters in Part 4, along with the entirety of
Prosper’s Contra collatorem., this later very probably from Part 3.They also include Gelasius to Euphemius, JK 620, another constituent of Part 3, though there is some question about their source for this letter.[1] Patzold concludes that "Whoever was responsible for the C-class must have had, as a basis for his work, a codex like that which we can still grasp in the two aforementioned manuscripts" W and P (37).

For
Patzold, it seems especially probative that the architects of C knew not only
the hard and fast constituents of the Sangermanensis,
but also the accretions in Part 3. Yet this is precisely where it gets hard. The
majority of Sangermanensis content in C is appended to the Leonine dossier that
we discussed last time. We get 102 letters of Leo the Great,
followed by the Breviarium of
Liberatus (Part 2 above), followed by the greater part of the concluding
letters (Part 4 above). It is only later on, disconnected from Leo and from these
appropriations, that we find possible traces of Part 3: Prosper’s Contra
collatorem comes after the decretals of Silverius in C; and JK 620,
Gelasius to Epiphanius, stands among the Gelasian decretals in C. Schwartz, who
took into account the Pseudo-Isidorian tradition when editing the Sangermanensis, did not think that the
items in Part 3 belonged and he preferred to read them as a later accretion;
and he was confirmed in this by the Pseudo-Isidorian tradition on hand in C,
which appears to leap directly from the Breviarium in Part 2 to the concluding
letters in Part 4. Schwartz either did not notice or he did not care that the
architects of C might well have known some of these supposed accretions, though they inserted them elsewhere.

It could surely be a coincidence that C is arranged in such a way as to
provide Schwartz with a text-critical argument to exclude Part 3, which he wished
to read as extraneous to the Sangermanensis for separate, internal reasons. Keep
in mind, however, that my four-part division of the Sangermanensis is artificial and
calibrated to the purposes of this discussion. In manuscript this collection presents
itself as an undifferentiated sequence,
beginning with the Codex Encyclius,
continuing with the Breviarium,
followed immediately by Prosper, then Aurelius, then the anti-Pelagian
statement from Augustine, then Gelasius, then Damasus, and then—again without
any differentiation—the final fund of letters that return the focus to the
Three Chapters. How likely is it that the architects of C could have neatly
excluded, from their appendix to the Leo letters, all the material that strikes
Schwartz, and perhaps us as well, as a later addition? How likely is it that their
knife should have excised those letters associated, at a formal level, with the Quesnelliana? If I have learned anything
from Gratianus, it is that I should pay attention whenever a formal
source leaves the building. Even an abiding interest in the Three Chapters could not account for C's leap from Part 2 to Part 4, for
the connection of various items in Part 4 to the Three Chapters is less than
obvious, requiring some explanation on Schwartz’s part.[2]

For all of these reasons, I would find it far from crazy to argue that the C recension draws on a different
tradition than P, the Corbie copy of the Sangermanensis—one
that provided the accretions in Part 3 not between Part 2 and Part 4, but
perhaps in some other connection.

In
conclusion, and by way of affirming that there is reason to believe that the architects of C knew the subcollection in Part 3 in some form, I provide an overview of how the material in Part 3 of the
Sangermanensis is handled by Pseudo-Isidore/C overall:

i)
Prosper, Contra collatorem, ends up
in C, attached to the decretals of Silverius.

ii)
Aurelius of Carthage on the condemnation of Pelagius ends up in
the anti-Pelagian appendix to the collection of Leo’s letters that, last time,
we called 71L. This is Stage 4 in Chavasse’s progression. This appendix is replaced sometime after Stage 5, so that its material does not occur in
the Leonine dossier of the C recension.

iv)
Gelasius, JK 620, ends up in C, attached to the rest of the Gelasius decretals
on hand there.

v)
Damasus to Paulinus, JK 235, Per filium
meum, with its appendix of conciliar anathemas, was available
to Pseudo-Isidore from the beginning in the Hispana.
C does not take it up anew.[3]

The contents of Sangermanensis/Part 3 are distributed
throughout the world of Pseudo-Isidore/C in very complementary fashion. Nothing
is wholly neglected; ii) and iii), which seem at first to have been neglected by the architects of C, were in fact taken up in an antecedent collection. And as v) reveals, nothing is ever duplicated.[3] Otherwise, in the world of
C, any association between the supposed accretions in Part 3 of the Sangermanensis and material from Part 2
or Part 4 of the collection are very consistently lacking. Whether we are talking
about the appendix to 71L, or the decretals of Silverius and Gelasius in C,
items from Part 3 never appear with Sangermanensis content from Part 2 or Part 4.

[1] Detlev Jasper, "Papal Letters and Decretals Written from the Beginning through the Pontificate of Gregory the Great (to 604)," in Papal Letters in the Early Middle Ages (Washington DC, 2001), 64. The Gelasius dossier in the C recension reproduces exactly the order of the Gelasius dossier in the Collectio Frisingensis (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 6243, s. VIII): "Whether this sequence has occurred by coincidence or is the result of the textual tradition remains unanswered." Relevant to this puzzle are Patzold's remarks in Gefälschtes Recht, 36-37, note 70.

[2] As a final proof, consider that the ninth-century table of contents in P does not demarcate the contents of Part 3 in any way at all. This account divides the context of the codex into theCodex Encyclius, theBreviariumof Liberatus, and Prosper’sContra collatorem, and then finally a series of “epistolae sanctorum patrum et exceptiones quaedam satis utillimae.”

[3] This is in contrast to the handling of JK 235 in the A1 recension. As noted above, the letter is divided into two parts, an initial
statement to Paulinus followed by the conclusions of a Roman council
anathematizing various heresies. The conciliar anathemas also occur in
Cassiodorus/Epiphanius, Historia
Tripartita, IX.15-16. A1 folds both of these chapters from the Historia Tripartita into its Damasus
dossier, and the curious consequence is that the A1 recension (and therefore
Hinschius’s edition) provides the conciliar anathemas from 380 twice, once from
the Hispana and once from
Cassiodorus/Epiphanius. The Tripartita borrowing corresponds to an excerpt mark
in Pseudo-Isidore’s codex of the Tripartita
(Zechiel-Eckes, "Ein Blick in Pseudoisidors Werkstatt," Francia 28 [2001], 43).

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About Me

I'm Eric Knibbs, Assistant Professor of History at Williams College in Williamstown, MA.

I work on the Pseudo-Isidorian Forgeries.

New readers unfamiliar with our pseudonymous friend, one of the most prolific and successful forgers in all of Western history, might want to start with the introductory posts (one, two, three, four, five; now supplemented).

Once you get through that, you might somehow find yourself wondering what I think. In that case, I invite you to explore my lengthy (and supposedly ongoing) Theory of Pseudo-Isidore series: